Lewis and Clark, designed by Cédrick Chaboussit, is resource and hand management game with an historical racing twist. The characters are real figures from history such as Meriweather Lewis, William Clark, and Seaman the dog. Each player is leading an expedition to map the Lousiana Purchase starting in St. Louis and ending in Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon State. Players will have to carefully manage how they utilize their cards and resources because reckless overloading of either may result in losing ground in this race to be history's first explorers across the expanding American territory.

Our discussion focused on the process Cédrick took in trying to get this game to a publisher. We also discussed the main strategy that I called loss management. In this game players want to be as efficient as possible and finding that efficiency is not easy as the game offers so many different ways to spend and acquire resources. We also talked about the camping mechanic, which may force a player to lose ground. It's an interesting and thematic mechanic in a race game that can be both rewarding and frustrating. Finally, we learned a bit about what drew Cédrick to the theme.

If you wish to purchase a copy of this game or learn more about it, please follow this link to Ludonaute's website. While there take a peek at Cédrick's next game: Discoveries, which is a dice game in the same world as Lewis and Clark. It sounds very interesting. I want to thank Cédrick for taking the time to speak with us. I was excited to have our second French designer on the show. I'm looking forward to the next.

King's Forge, designed by Nick Sibicky, is a dice management game about becoming the best craftsman in the king's court. Play happens over the course of 3 phases: gather, craft, and clean-up. In the first phase, players use their dice on gather cards that will allow them to acquire more dice. During the crafting phase, players roll those dice they have collected in hopes of crafting beautiful items that they king has requested. These cards represent the items needed to win the game. In the final phase, dice are cleared from the cards or returned to players' stashes, and the game continues. The game ends when on player crafts 4 cards. While this game sounds simple, the strategy in the game revolves around the fact that players cannot use the dice they acquire during gathering on the same crafting phase. Players must weigh the acquisition of new dice with the potential acquisition of game end points.

Our discussion focused on the driving strategy of the game, which is, as I wrote above, the balance between instant gratification and patience for a better future. We also learned much about how Nick designs his games as well as the kinds of games that draw Nick as a player.

If you wish to learn more about King's Forge or wish to purchase a copy, please check out Game Salute's website. Also, Nick hosts a youtube video podcast about Go, which outlines so much about a game from centuries ago.

Chip Beauvais is writing a series of articles on board game player psychographic profiles for the website Whose Turn Is It Anyway. The purpose of these articles is as a resource for game designers who wish to understand the types of players who play their games. Chip is the designer of the game Chroma Cubes.

Our discussion focused on his motivation behind writing this series and where the series started off. We explored the ideas behind the second article, which analyzes two specific gamer types he titles Erin and Ingrid (competitive players and optimizing players). Both of these profiles, according to Chip, are driven by the goal of the game.

If you wish to learn more about these player profiles or read the other articles in the series, please visit Whose Turn Is It Anyway and look for the articles titled Player Psychographic Profiles. Chip has more articles coming out in the future.

On Who, What, Why? we discuss game design with game designers and try to learn more about the game design process from the people who design games. Each episode we interview a designer of card games, board games, role playing games, or video games. We have both mainstream and independent developers as guests.